Don Black was a participant or observer in the following events:

Richard Butler, the head of the white separatist and neo-Nazi organization Aryan Nations (see Early 1970s), hosts the first Aryan World Congress at the Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. The event attracts many of the area’s racist leaders. Butler begins holding more gatherings in subsequent years and begins appointing state leaders of Aryan Nations chapters. One of the brightest young leaders in Butler’s coterie is Robert Jay Mathews, who will go on to found the violent white supremacist group The Order (see Late September 1983). Other prominent Nations members at the conferences include: Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance; Louis Beam, a former Klansman who will promote the concept of “leaderless resistance” (see February 1992); Don Black, a former Klansman who will create Stormfront, the largest white separatist forum on the Internet; and Kirk Lyons, a well-known lawyer who will represent a number of extremists facing criminal charges. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010]

Douglas Bay, Dominica. [Source: Happy Tellus (.com)]Two of three mercenaries accused of plotting to overthrow the government of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Dominica are found guilty of conspiracy and violation of the Neutrality Act. Stephen Don Black, a prominent Alabama Ku Klux Klan leader, and Joe Daniel Hawkins, a Klansman from Mississippi, are found guilty of the charges. Both are found not guilty of violating five firearms statutes. The plot began in 1979, when the neighboring island country of Grenada was taken over by a socialist regime with ties to the Communist government of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Mike Perdue, a former Marine and prominent white supremacist, discussed retaking Grenada with ousted former Prime Minister Eric Gairy. Perdue sought out Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, who put him in touch with white supremacist Donald Clarke Andrews, then living in Canada. Andrews had led the white supremacist group Western Guard, and after serving a jail sentence for neo-Nazi activities, founded a new pro-Aryan group, the Nationalist Party of Canada. Andrews convinced Perdue that Dominica might be a good place from which to stage a coup in Grenada. Dominica was in the grip of grinding poverty, having been devastated by a hurricane in 1979 and plagued with racial violence from a splinter group of Rastafarians called the Dreads. The island’s government was unstable and, Perdue and Andrews believed, ripe for overthrow. Perdue partnered with another supremacist, Wolfgang Droege, and began planning to stage a coup that would place former Prime Minister Patrick John back in power. Even though John was something of a leftist, and wanted to displace the much more right-wing and pro-American Prime Minister, Eugenia Charles, in September 1980 Perdue and John agreed in writing to commence what they called “Operation Red Dog,” a violent coup with the goal of placing John back in charge of the government. The Washington Times will later report: “The coup forged some odd alliances. [It] united right-wing North Americans and Caribbean leftists, white nationalists and black revolutionaries; First World capitalists and Third World Socialists.” Canadian writer Stewart Bell later describes Perdue as a man of no real political convictions and a lust for money who routinely lies about his Vietnam experience (he never served in Southeast Asia, and did not tell his companions that he was a homosexual), and Droege as a German-Canadian high school dropout with neo-Nazi sympathies. Others involved in the putative coup are nightclub owner and white supremacist Charles Yanover, gunrunner Sydney Burnett-Alleyne (who supplied the initial connection to John), Black, Hawkins, and a small number of others. The mercenaries’ plan was to put John back in power; in return, John would give them license to use the island as a haven for casinos, drug smuggling, and money laundering. Almost from the outset, the conspiracy was infiltrated by two agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), John Osburg and Wally Grafton, who were alerted to the planned coup by charter boat captain Mike Howell. Perdue had tried to hire Howell to take the mercenaries to Dominica, and told Howell that his was a CIA operation. Members of the operation also talked to others about it; one even gave a “secret” interview to a radio reporter in Hamilton. Osburg and Grafton alerted law enforcement authorities; on the night of the raid, federal authorities overwhelmed the small band of mercenaries, arrested them all, and confiscated a large number of firearms, 10 pounds of dynamite, over 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and a large red-and-black Nazi flag. The operation was later derisively termed the “Bayou of Pigs,” a joking reference to the 1961 attempt by right-wing American mercenaries to overthrow Castro’s government. John was arrested in Dominica. Perdue and six other participants have already pled guilty to violating the Neutrality Act. Before his sentencing of three years in prison, Black says, “What we were doing was in the best interests of the United States and its security in the hemisphere, and we feel betrayed by our own government.” [Time, 5/11/1981; United Press International, 6/21/1981; New Times, 2/19/1998; Washington Times, 10/5/2008; Winnipeg Free Press, 11/2/2008] After serving his jail term, Black will go on to found the influential white supremacist organization Stormfront (see March 1995 and June 22, 2008).

Don Black, working on the Stormfront.org Web site. [Source: New Times / David Abel]Don Black, the owner of the overtly racist, “white nationalist” Web site Stormfront.org (see March 1995), gives an interview to a reporter from the progressive New Times. Black later posts the interview on his site, with a mocking introduction that calls the report full of “nasty invective” and “arguably the most malicious article I’ve ever had written about me since they started coming 30 years ago.” Black tells the reporter: “We see the breakup [of the United States] coming in about 20 years—it’s a natural progression of events. The Internet is a means of planting seeds for the future. There are a lot of middle-class people who feel disaffected—and in Stormfront they can find what they can’t in the mass media. It’s about building a community and attracting hard-core supporters. We don’t use the ‘n_gger, n_gger’ type of approaches. We don’t want to present the Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera image of rabid racists [referring to two confrontational talk show hosts whose guests routinely scream invective at one another]. There are a lot of people who want to agree with us. They just don’t want to be associated with that.” Black explains why he and his fellow white supremacists do not support the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, saying: “I’m not into Martin Luther King’s birthday, of course. It’s an example of a government that no longer represents the interest of the majority of its people. One that no longer represents the heritage of this country. But the minority liberal, multcultural orthodoxy in this country has determined him to be a national hero. And while most Americans opposed the holiday—white Americans, of course—they now have to accept it, like they have accepted everything imposed on them.” Of his West Palm Beach, Florida, neighborhood, Black says he is uncomfortable with the number of Latinos that live there: “It bothers me this area is more Guatemalan than American. It bothers me to wait in line at Publix [a local grocery store] for a Guatemalan to get out his food stamps. I don’t want to pay taxes for them. It’s too much like New York—it’s the front lines of the third world invasion.” He tells the reporter that he doesn’t hate people of other races, he just thinks they should not live in the US. Black works primarily as a Web designer, making commercial sites for local businesses and a few political clients around the country, and doing pro bono work for a number of other white supremacist organizations such as Aryan Nations, The Truth at Last Newspaper, the Church of the Creator’s Web site (COTC—see July-December 1995), a Ku Klux Klan history site, and an Aryan Dating Page. His wife also works to support the family. The majority of Black’s worktime goes into maintaining Stormfront. The latest addition to the site, a discussion forum, requires constant monitoring, he says, both to purge harshly critical comments from critics and to delete posts that advocate violence, give bomb-making instructions, and the like. He also spends a great deal of time defending the site from “cyber attacks,” saying that outside sources relentlessly bombard the servers with denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, “ping floods,” “email bombs,” and other attempts to crash the Stormfront servers and drive the site offline. He plans on adding a live call-in streaming-audio broadcast soon. The site features links to sites that deny the Holocaust, propound “scientifically” based racism, display graphic images of Nazi and SS emblems and paraphernelia, and a plethora of racist and anti-Semitic essays and documents. Michael Winograd of the Anti-Defamation League says of Black: “He is showing the way for Klansmen, neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and other haters who now utilize the World Wide Web to spread their propaganda and seek to attract new members. [Black] is a troubling character precisely because he is relatively articulate and intelligent and is not the knuckle-scraping neanderthal one might expect.” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, says: “The lunatic fringe has embraced this technology with a sophistication and a veracity that is frightening.… What started as a trickle has now evolved into an incredible deluge. In the last year alone, we’ve seen a 300 percent increase in the number of these pages put up on the World Wide Web.… We should be concerned about tomorrow’s Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) emerging and saying, ‘Well this turns me on,’ or ‘I’m really angry about this too.’” Black’s site is at the forefront of this movement. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke says of Black: “Don is more than a very good friend, he is one of the leading individuals in the white-rights movement. He’s matured over time—like we all do with age—into a very calm and stoic individual. He has always been a dedicated individual that’s self-sacrificing.” [New Times, 2/19/1998]

Stephen “Don” Black. [Source: Page2Live (.com)]Don Black, an Alabama white supremacist who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, founds an organization called Stormfront. Stormfront’s Web site, Stormfront.org, will become the most prominent white supremacist site on the Internet, and will come to serve as the hub of a network of related Web sites. [Swain and Nieli, 1995, pp. 153-157; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2005] The site states its purpose: “Stormfront is a resource for those courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White Western culture, ideals, and freedom of speech and association—a forum for planning strategies and forming political and social groups to ensure victory.” [New Times, 2/19/1998] The Stormfront motto is “White Pride World Wide.” Bob DeMarais, a former staff member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970-1974), later writes, “Without a doubt, Stormfront is the most powerful active influence in the White Nationalist movement.” By 2005, the site will boast some 52,000 members and Jamie Kelso, who will begin working with Black in 2002, will claim 500 new members join every week. DeMarais will give Kelso a great deal of credit for building the Stormfront community of users. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2005] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) will call Stormfront.org the first “hate site” on the Internet. [Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001]Began Extolling White Supremacist Ideology in High School, Went on to Lead KKK - Black began his career as a white supremacist while still in high school in the early 1970s, joining the National Socialist White People’s Party and handing out racist tabloids to his fellow students. In 1971, he was shot by Jerry Ray, the manager for white supremacist J.B. Stoner’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassin James Earl Ray, thought that Black had broken into Stoner’s office to steal a mailing list for the National Socialist White People’s Party. Black recovered, and attended the University of Alabama, where he was ejected from the ROTC program for his racist statements. Subsequently he began working with Klan leader David Duke to revitalize the foundering Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). According to a 1995 report by the progressive New Times: “Duke taught Black it’s easier to attract supporters by criticizing affirmative action, illegitimate welfare births, and illegal immigration than labeling blacks as inferior or Jews as rich enemies. The goal was to avoid inflammatory remarks and present oneself as dignified—sticking to the issues. Supremacy is presented as nationalism. And intolerance warps into a preference for one’s own heritage.” After Duke was forced out of the KKK over allegations of selling its mailing list, Black took over the organization until 1981, when he spent three years in prison for fomenting a plot with other supremacists to invade the tiny Caribbean island nation of Dominica (see June 21, 1981). Black learned to program computers during his prison term. He returned to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985, telling friends, “I’m here to build the greatest white racist regime this country has ever seen.” After quitting the Klan because of its overt advocacy of violence, he decided to execute his plans via the Internet, still in its infancy at the time. [Swain and Nieli, 1995, pp. 153-157; New Times, 2/19/1998; BBC, 1/12/2000; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2005] Black’s efforts will be quite successful; in 1995, he will tell a reporter: “A third of households have computers and with the phenomenal growth of the Internet, tens of millions of people have access to our message if they wish. The access is anonymous and there is unlimited ability to communicate with others of a like mind.” [New York Times, 3/13/1995]Launches Internet BBS that Becomes Stormfront - In 1991, having married Duke’s ex-wife Chloe and moved to Florida, Black launched an Internet bulletin board (BBS) to support Duke’s unsuccessful candidacy for a US Senate seat from Louisiana. In early posts on Stormfront, Black explains that white Americans have as much right to espouse their culture as any other group, and says that Stormfront attempts to provide an alternative to the mainstream American media, which he says is dominated by Jews and liberals who routinely disparage and mock whites. Black says that his racist views are in line with those held by Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers. He calls the site the Internet presence for the “white nationalist” movement, which proclaims its intention to “separate” from minorities and found an all-white nation or state within American borders. He will tell a reporter: “We believe that our people, white people in this country and throughout the world, are being discriminated against. They’re being treated as second-class citizens. We’re tired of seeing other racial and ethnic groups impose their agenda on us.” [Swain and Nieli, 1995, pp. 153-157; New Times, 2/19/1998; BBC, 1/12/2000]Expansion - Between 1995 and 1997, Stormfront features the violent, racist writings of the National Alliance’s William Pierce (see 1978), his former mentor David Duke, the National Alliance’s Institute for Historical Review (a Holocaust-denying think tank), and others. The site promotes an array of conspiracy theories surrounding the 1992 Ruby Ridge shootings (see August 31, 1992), the 1993 Branch Davidian debacle (see April 19, 1993), and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). On Stormfront’s Web site, right-wing lawyer Kirk Lyons compares the Branch Davidian events to the Nazi destruction of the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice. Anti-Semitic writer Eustace Mullins suggests that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization dedicated to tracking and challenging racist organizations, was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. The site houses a library of neo-Nazi graphics available for download, a list of phone numbers for racist computer bulletin boards not on the Internet, and a page of links to other hate sites. By 1997, Stormfront begins hosting pages of other extremist groups such as Aryan Nations (see Early 1970s), and individuals such as Ed Fields, who publishes the racist newsletter The Truth at Last. Black reprints white supremacist articles and essays, including one that attacks the Talmud, a Jewish holy book, as filled with “malice,” “hate-mongering,” and “barbarities.” Black also reprints an essay by neo-Nazi Louis Beam (see February 1992), who claims he has knowledge of a Jewish conspiracy to censor the Internet. Black also adds new features to his site: pages “proving” the “inferiority” of the “Negro” race, a translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a page of “quotes” by Jews that are either false or deliberately mistranslated along with quotes by anti-Semites, and “White Singles,” a dating service for “heterosexual, white gentiles only.” Black also adds a news section, White Nationalist News Agency (NNA), which posts the text of articles from the Associated Press and other reputable news sources, apparently without legal permission and often with racist commentary included. Black also hosts “Blitzcast,” an audio podcast that lets listeners hear speeches by the late George Lincoln Rockwell, the assassinated leader of the American Nazi Party; William Pierce; anti-Semitic Jew Benjamin Freedman; and Frank Weltner, who hosts another Black-operated site, Jew Watch. Yet another site Black hosts, Bamboo Delight, hides anti-Semitic materials behind the false front of a company selling “Tai Chi Chuan Chinese Exercise” materials. Looking past “Asian Health Philosophy” items such as the “Nine Treasure Exercises of Ancient China” videotape and the “Skinny Buddha Weight Loss Method” pamphlet, visitors find the downloadable computer programs “Jew Rats,” “Police Patriots,” “ZOG,” and “Talmud.” These programs are interactive in the same way that Web pages are interactive: users “click through” their contents, viewing various pages filled with text and graphics. “Jew Rats” is a multi-panel cartoon that depicts Jews as rats that kill Christians and encourage integration. Blacks are depicted as sub-human gorillas. “ZOG” contains the complete text of the “classic” anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” along with dozens of other documents that claim knowledge of Jewish plans for world domination. Adrian Edward Marlow, who owns the servers Black uses for Stormfront and the other related sites, has bought over 10 domains that seem to be the URLs of prominent newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, and the London Telegraph. By October 1998, Marlow has redirected those domains directly to Stormfront. Typing in “philadelphiainquirer.com,” for example, does not bring surfers to the Philadelphia newspaper’s Web site, but to Stormfront. (The Inquirer will subsequently secure that domain name from Marlow.) [Anti-Defamation League, 1998]Deliberate Attempts at 'Moderating' Message - Black takes care not for his site to appear overly crude or violent. Forum posters are warned to avoid using racial slurs and not to post violent threats or exhortations to illegal activities, “moderating” tactics apparently learned from Duke. Black will also be somewhat successful at presenting himself, and by extension his supremacist ideology, on television, insisting that his site is more about presenting information not filtered by the “media monopoly” than promoting racist beliefs (see January 13, 1998). Kelso later tells a reporter with evident pride: “One of the things that Don Black does very well is he doesn’t fit the stereotype of an angry man. Don is the most under-recognized giant in the whole white nationalist movement.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2005] Black will deny that the name “Stormfront” has any Nazi connotations, and in 1998 will explain the name, saying: “You need a colorful name. We wanted something militant-sounding that was also political and social. Stormfront says turbulence is coming, and afterwards there’ll be a cleansing effect.” Though his site is peppered with virulent anti-Semitic claims and articles, Black will deny that either he or his site espouses any hatred towards Jews. Black will also deny that he is a neo-Nazi or even a white supremacist, and say he is a “racialist” (see September 1983, March 15, 2002, July 15, 2002, and June 7, 2009) but not a racist. Black will call the term “racist” nothing more than a “scare word” with little real meaning. His son Derek will soon open a subsidiary site aimed at white children, “Stormfront for Kids” (see July 16, 2001). [Swain and Nieli, 1995, pp. 153-157; New Times, 2/19/1998; BBC, 1/12/2000] In 1998, the ADL will take issue with Black’s claims of not being a racist, writing, “Though Black claims to be a ‘White Nationalist,’ not a hatemonger, his idea of ‘White Pride’ involves demeaning, demonizing, and menacing Jews and non-whites, and his concept of ‘victory’ includes the creation of ethnically cleansed political enclaves. [Anti-Defamation League, 1998] In 2001, David Friedman of the Anti-Defamation League will tell a reporter: “Put aside your prejudices about who’s in the hate movement. If you’re looking for people in white sheets, you won’t find them. These are sophisticated bigots who have thought very carefully about the best ways to proselytize people to their hate.” [USA Today, 7/16/2001]

Don Black, the white supremacist who runs the racist Web site Stormfront.org (see March 1995), appears on ABC News’s Nightline, along with host Ted Koppel and First Amendment advocate Floyd Abrams, a prominent lawyer. Black is introduced as “a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.” During the interview, Black strives to give the appearance of a moderate, thoughtful person who does not espouse racial hatred, and explains that through Stormfront, he has “recruited people” via the Internet whom he “otherwise wouldn’t have reached.” He also says that sites such as Stormfront “provide those people who are attracted to our ideas with a forum to talk to each other and to form a virtual community.” Black says his views are entirely reasonable: “You may consider my views dangerous, but so were those of the Founding Fathers, who were considered dangerous. In fact, their views… weren’t that much different from my own.… Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, what I’m saying was part of the mainstream.” In the days after the interview, Black will claim a 400 percent increase in visitors to his site. [Anti-Defamation League, 1998]

A screenshot from ‘Stormfront for Kids,’ depicting the site’s logo and two Confederate-era flags. [Source: USA Today]USA Today reports on the participation of Derek Black, the 12-year-old son of Don Black, in his father’s Web activities. The elder Black operates Stormfront, the Internet’s first large-scale Web site promoting racial hatred and white supremacy (see March 1995). Black is proud of his son, telling a reporter that he “[c]ouldn’t ask for anything more.” He keeps a framed photo of Derek dressed in a Confederate soldier’s uniform above his desk in his home office. Derek runs the site’s children’s section, Stormfront for Kids, under his father’s supervision. The children’s pages feature puzzles, games, animated Confederate flags, audio files of white-pride songs, what USA Today calls “an inflammatory article about Martin Luther King Jr.,” and a personal statement from Derek asking visitors to stop sending him hate mail. “I get a lot of people who think I’m just a pawn in this horrible game of lies,” says Derek, who has been home-schooled since third grade by his mother, Chloe. “One person said: ‘Don’t listen to what your father says. Go turn on the Discovery Channel. Find out what the real world is like.’ Why would I turn on the TV to find out what the real world is like?” Stormfront for Kids is emblematic of the white supremacist movement’s outreach to younger potential members. Of the estimated 2,500 “hate” Web sites, 44 have sections designed for children, teens, and parents, according to Mark Weitzman of the Wiesenthal Center’s Task Force Against Hate. Though the number of sites may be small, USA Today reports that child psychologists and others monitoring their activity are alarmed about their reach and influence. “If you have a susceptible child who is angry and depressed, the sites could push a child toward certain behavior,” says psychiatrist Sirgay Sanger, director of New York City’s Early Care Center. “It’s the first step toward throwing a rock.” Weitzman says: “The number of people involved in these movements is not the only important factor. Sometimes when the numbers are low, members think the only way they can get their message across is through an act of domestic terrorism or extreme violence.” The most effective way that Stormfront and other groups such as the National Alliance (see 1970-1974) reach young people is through “skinhead” music, says Jordan Kessler, director of an Internet monitoring unit for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “This is a language kids understand—a band of cool-looking young guys blasting out music.” One label, Resistance Records (see Late 1993 and Summer 1999), sold “close to $1 million” in merchandise last year, mostly online, according to Erich Gliebe, the leader of the National Alliance and the CEO of Resistance Records. That label sells items such as Nazi parade flags and a CD titled “War Songs of the 3rd Reich, Vol. 3.” Black says, “People say, ‘You’re teaching your son Satan.’” But, he says, “I think anyone who is critical of me for instilling in my son my world view has lost track of how a society should function.” [USA Today, 7/16/2001]

Jared Taylor. [Source: Jared Taylor]The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishes a profile of Jared Taylor, an academic often seen and heard on news and opinion broadcasts as a “race-relations expert,” but called by the Post-Gazette “a racist in the guise of [an] ‘expert.’” The profile follows a number of radio appearances made by Taylor on January 17, the federal holiday honoring the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Taylor, according to the Post-Gazette, told his audiences that King “was a philanderer, a plagiarist, and a drinker who left a legacy of division and resentment, and was unworthy of a national holiday.” Taylor heads the New Century Foundation (NCF), a Virginia-based organization that promotes the ideas that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex drives, and other pseudo-scientific ideas about blacks and other minorities. The Post-Gazette writes that “Taylor keeps company with a collection of racists, racial ‘separatists,’ and far-right extremists,” including some of the NCF board members, who have included members of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the successor to the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and ‘60s; a member of the American Friends of the British National Party (BNP), a far-right neo-Nazi political party in Britain; and an anti-immigration author who has reviewed books for a Holocaust denial journal. Taylor publishes American Renaissance magazine, which regularly publishes “academic” follies that “prove” multiculturalism is wrong. He once wrote for the magazine, “If whites permit themselves to be displaced, it is not just the high culture of the West that could disappear but such things as representative government, rule of law, and freedom of speech, which whites usually get right and everyone else usually gets wrong.” Taylor, like former Klan leader David Duke, Web site owner and former Klansman Don Black (see March 1995), and others, is among the leaders of what the Post-Gazette calls “the new tactics of white supremacy.” Taylor and his confreres eschew the crude race-baiting and calls for explicit violence for more dispassionate, pseudo-academic and media-friendly presentations that use false science and “moderate” language to push their racist views. Taylor’s staff secured a half-dozen radio spots for King’s holiday by sending out the following email to dozens of radio stations: “Not everyone celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King. Editor of American Renaissance magazine and race-relations expert Jared Taylor would be pleased to offer your listeners a view of Dr. King that challenges conventional wisdom.” The email listed Taylor’s resume: degrees from Yale and the Institute for Political Study in Paris, business consultant in Japan, author of four books. “Jared Taylor is the cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy,” says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He is the guy who is providing the intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen.” Taylor denies ever being a member of the Klan, or even knowing any Klan members, but both Black and Duke have appeared at his American Renaissance conferences; Potok has a photograph of Black having a beer at Taylor’s kitchen table. Taylor routinely denies publishing racially inflammatory material in his magazine, even when confronted with the actual published material, and denies writing white supremacist material for the BNP’s monthly magazine, Spearhead, even though his work (published under his “other name,” Samuel Taylor, is readily accessible). He says that those who call him a racist merely want to avoid having a rational discussion about his ideas. However, his ties with racist organizations are easily proven. Taylor has hosted former BNP leader John Tyndall at his home in Oakton, Virginia. The NCF’s 1999 tax returns list the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) as an organization to which the NCF is “related… through common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers, etc.” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1/23/2005] The Anti-Defamation League will later write, “[Taylor] maintains ties to a variety of racist organizations, publications, and individuals, both domestic and international, and many of North America’s leading intellectual racists have written for American Renaissance or have addressed the biennial American Renaissance conferences.” [Anti-Defamation League, 2011]

Stormfront logo. [Source: Don Black]According to an article by the Washington Post, owners and operators of racist, white supremacist Web sites such as Stormfront (see March 1995) report a large increase in traffic, apparently sparked by Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)‘s recent naming as the Democratic nominee for president. Billy Roper, a former member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970-1974 and Summer 2005) and now the chief of an Arkansas group called White Revolution, says: “I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time. Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president.” Deborah Lauter, the civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), says: “[W]e’re finding an explosion in these kinds of hateful sentiments on the Net, and it’s a growing problem. There are probably thousands of Web sites that do this now. I couldn’t even tell you how many are out there because it’s growing so fast.” The white power organizations acknowledge that they have little chance to derail Obama’s candidacy, so instead some of them say they are using it to energize their membership and reach out for new members. The Post reports, “[t]he groups now portray [Obama’s] candidacy as a vehicle to disenfranchise whites and polarize America.” The groups have helped foster the debunked rumors that Obama is a Muslim, that his books are overtly racist, that his wife Michelle is a radical black activist who hates “whitey,” and other claims. Stormfront’s owner, Don Black, says that since 1995, he has tried to make his site a “central meeting place for the white power movement.” Obama’s nomination is helping him fulfill his vision, he says. Black has 40 moderators running 54 message boards that welcome over 40,000 unique visitors every day. Posters on Stormfront complain that Obama represents the end of “white rule” and the beginning of “multiculturalism.” They fear that he will promote affirmative action, support illegal immigration, and help render whites, who make up two-thirds of the US population, “the new minority.” Black says: “I get nonstop emails and private message from new people who are mad as hell about the possibility of Obama being elected. White people, for a long time, have thought of our government as being for us, and Obama is the best possible evidence that we’ve lost that. This is scaring a lot of people who maybe never considered themselves racists, and it’s bringing them over to our side.” David Duke, Black’s former mentor and a former Ku Klux Klan leader, says his Web site’s traffic has doubled. White supremacist Dan Hill, who runs an extremist group in northern Michigan, says his cohorts are more willing to “take serious action” and plan rallies to protest politicians and immigration; he says he recently drove to an Obama rally and tried to “get a riot started or something.” Roper says White Revolution receives about 10 new applicants each week, more than double the norm. Ron Doggett, who helps Duke run a white power group called EURO in Virginia, says: “Our side does better when the public is being pressured, when gas prices are high, when housing is bad, when a black man might be president. People start looking for solutions and changes, and we offer radical changes to what’s going on.” Duke says: “One person put it this way: Obama for president paves the way for David Duke as president. This is finally going to make whites begin to realize it’s a necessity to stick up for their own heritage, and that’s going to make them turn to people like me. We’re the next logical step.” Doggett worries that an Obama presidential victory may doom the white supremacist movement, saying: “What you try not to think about is that maybe if Obama wins, it will create a very demoralizing effect. Maybe people see him in office, and it’s like: ‘That’s it. It’s just too late. Look at what’s happened now. We’ve endured all these defeats, and we’ve still got a multicultural society.’ And then there’s just no future for our viewpoint.” [Washington Post, 6/22/2008]

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